Nick Sal's HubSpot Inbound Marketing and Consulting Blog

The hardest task with running a successful business isn’t the services you provide nor the products you sell, but often the people you have and the team you build. Recruiting a rock solid team that shares your passion, vision, and goals is a challenge every business faces. But never fear, Hubspot and inbound recruiting is here!

What is the concept of "inbound recruiting"?

Many marketers are beginning to understand the need for inbound marketing. In Hubspot's words, “It's marketing with a magnet, not a sledgehammer — marketing based on content that attracts and nurtures prospects, not spam that interrupts them.” When InfoTrust started using Hubspot, our site traffic dramatically increased and our content was starting to get recognized online as an authority in web analytics. Of course, from this we began getting more leads and then more customers and then a need to hire.

Awesome, right?

Well, yes but we didn’t have any candidates lined up. Then the idea struck like a bolt of lightning, we’re using Hubspot to get a bunch of leads lined up that we want to convert into customers… can we do the same for applicants that we want to “convert” to employees? Thus, inbound recruiting (with Hubspot) was born.

We like to define inbound recruiting as “recruiting that is focused on sharing your company’s story and culture, in order to attract and nurture applicants that fit the company’s image and business objectives.” Why should a candidate only see one “About Us” page to get a flavor of your company’s culture?

Ways to Start Inbound Recruitment

There are many ways to begin inbound recruitment. It typically starts with understanding exactly what your company is all about, what content is needed to build that message, and determine goals with your recruitment efforts. Once you have that foundation built, getting your site and inbound marketing efforts set is the easy part. Using a combination of CTAs for jobs available, landing pages of various job descriptions, forms and lists to segment applicants, and email nurturing to keep applicants engaged will drive your applications through the roof!

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Building more and more content to get the right types of visitors to your site is key. At InfoTrust, we not only have our career pages but actively blog and write news posts about company outings, volunteer events and updates with the company. We constantly post on social media to draw in our ideal candidates and even established our own twitter hashtag, #workatinfotrust, that employees tweet at whenever they feel like sharing something about the company. We even have a recruitment video that highlights our culture (with a “part 2” version in the works!):

Inbound recruiting has been tremendously successful for InfoTrust because the overall company culture is to embrace digital technology and marketing. We fully encourage employees to express themselves freely as to draw in more rock stars similar to the current team. Heather Alessandro, Director of HR and Operations at InfoTrust, wrote a great article about some specific ways to leverage Hubspot for inbound recruitment. She explains in greater detail the 10 tactics for inbound recruitment with Hubspot:

Create a profile of your ideal job/company applicant

Think of your content as a team of explorers; searching for applicants

Work on SEO and link building to draw in more candidates

Build landing pages to test job descriptions and application forms

Engage in applicant nurturing

Personalize your communication, even if it’s a career newsletter

Connect with applicants soon, while they’re most interested!

Track your competitors

Integrate your campaigns with Salesforce (or the CRM you use)

MEASURE ROI!

To summarize, recruitment is not easy, it takes time and effort to market your company and get quality applicants to apply. You also have to make sure that you are generating the best ROI for the dollars that you spend across your recruitment channels. Inbound recruitment can help you generate great results, and HubSpot is the best inbound marketing platforms.